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Current American social and political forces alarmingly resemble those that helped push the late Roman economy in Western Europe into the Dark Ages. The basic similarity between late Rome and present-day America is that in each case manmade political and social developments seriously damaged a formerly robust commercial world, leading to enormous disparities in wealth and opportunity. The few Romans who possessed that wealth and opportunity were able to negotiate tax and legal concessions that greatly weakened the central government, atomized the state and ultimately destroyed its legitimacy. The concessions that Congress is granting to America's super-rich today, such as constantly reduced taxes and freedom from legal restraints, head in the same direction. The U.S. does, however, have crucial advantages: We know where the present road leads, whereas the Romans did not, and as a democracy we still have the chance to change our fate. When Marcus Aurelius became the Roman emperor, in 161 A.D., ruling the largest state the world had ever known, it was "the period in the history of the world," according to Edward Gibbon, "during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous." Today many would say the same for the 20th-century U.S. In the Roman world, a robust class of knights, entrepreneurs, civic leaders, and well-paid retired soldiers inhabited the empire's many cities and towns, enjoying a market-based and monetized economy. The empire's per capita money supply, measured as a multiple of the amount needed for subsistence, was nearly 80% as much as circulates in the U.S. today. Even in primitive northwestern Europe, where Rome stationed its army at frontier posts like Cologne, Mainz and Vienna, cash salaries and pension payments, plus the use of private businesses to supply food, arms and other necessities, ensured a city-centered, money-based market economy. The crisis of the third century A.D. demolished this world and led to a social and economic restructuring of late Roman society. In northwestern Europe it produced an oligarchy of a few exceptionally wealthy families. The elevation of the extremely wealthy to oligarchic status is happening differently today, but the outcome of that elevation could follow a similarly disastrous course. The social and economic restructuring of northwestern Europe in Roman times began with a series of disasters and wars not entirely unlike the Great Recession and multiple wars that afflicted the beginning of Barack Obama's presidency. These shocks devastated the population and sharply reduced production. Marcus Aurelius' foolish son Commodus squandered the imperial treasury, and expenses skyrocketed as later emperors launched expensive wars of choice against family enemies, greatly enlarged their imperial armies and raised military salaries. The emperor who followed Commodus, expressing a view somewhat akin to that of recent Republican administrations, advised his sons: "Be of one mind: Enrich the soldiers; trouble about nothing else." Since the tax revenues from a diminished empire could not meet such increased expenditures, the emperors started paying soldiers and suppliers in depreciated coinage. Credit and commerce collapsed under the resulting inflation and distrust, barter returned to poorer parts of the empire like northwestern Europe, and land values there plummeted. Peasants fled from soldiers and vagabonds foraging for food, the urban middle classes floundered, and the surviving towns and cities, barely hanging on, could no longer protect the countryside and its farms. Only the very rich--Roman senators, imperial generals and the like--had the diversified investments that allowed them to escape the poverty and dangers that engulfed virtually everyone else. These wealthy Romans acquired huge tracts of land at bargain prices, becoming the owners of northwestern Europe's most productive assets. They could offer protection and aid in return for loyal service, and desperate men flocked to their employment (mostly tenancy). The emperors now had to wheedle taxes and manpower from these great powers. The resulting bargains gradually sapped imperial power, and after the Vandals sacked Rome itself, in 455, the last emperor soon departed. Northwestern Europe's new social and economic structure consigned the vast majority of the population to miserably impoverished lives. The self-sufficient great landowners had little interest in maintaining roads, protecting those who were not employees or generating prosperity for others. Except in their own households, life was largely reduced to the terms of subsistence, and in the absence of a more widespread demand for goods and services, even the richest could no longer find or acquire luxuries that had once been commonplace. As the very wealthy assume political power through the virtually unlimited campaign spending that the U.S. Supreme Court now allows, do they not also demand tax relief and legal protections? And if their power becomes overwhelming, is it not foreseeable that their demands could debilitate our military strength, and the government's ability to protect the public interest within its own borders? The same economic laws still apply. If the very rich can use their power to monopolize wealth today and a prosperous middle class disappears, then the disappearance of demand will force even the wealthiest to suffer a sharply reduced style of life. Despite its dire economic consequences, the late Roman structure of society suited the powerful, who could not be challenged. What we call feudalism lasted for many centuries. There is no obvious reason why an oligarchic structure could not prove equally long-lasting in the U.S., once it took hold. Keith Roberts graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School and has served as attorney or chief executive at investment advisory, real estate development, distribution and manufacturing businesses. He is an arbitrator for the Financial Industries Regulatory Authority and a mediator in the New York court system, and is the author of The Origins of Business, Money and Markets, which will be published in June by Columbia University Press. The Decline And Fall Of The American Empire?
Keith Roberts, 05.25.11, 11:30 AM EDTThe parallels between the U.S. today and ancient Rome are unsettling.
Keith Roberts
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